How to Preserve Spaces and Line Breaks When Displaying Database Text in HTML?

How to Preserve Spaces and Linebreaks When Rendering a String in HTML

When retrieving a text string from a database, you may encounter formatting challenges when rendering it in HTML. Specifically, spaces and new lines can get stripped out or ignored by HTML's default behavior. To preserve these formatting elements, we can employ the following approaches:

Using CSS

The CSS property white-space can be used to control how white space within a block element is handled:

div {
    white-space: pre-wrap;
}

This setting forces the browser to wrap white space as necessary, preserving spaces and new line characters as they were in the original string.

<div>
This is some text   with some extra spacing    and a
few newlines along with some trailing spaces        
     and five leading spaces thrown in
for                                              good
measure                                              
</div>

Using HTML Encoding

You mentioned HTML Encode doesn't seem to work as expected. However, here's how you can use it correctly:

string encodedString = System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(yourString);

Remember that HTML encoding doesn't affect spaces and line breaks. It primarily converts special characters like "<", "&", and ">" into HTML entities to prevent them from being interpreted as HTML tags.

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